PraxisAuril – Making a national asset of UK Knowledge Exchange
17 Feb 2020
The drive for university-business collaboration – of all shapes and sizes – has never been stronger as we look towards the next budget and the 2027 R&D target. While there is still Brexit uncertainty, we have a strong Government which is putting research and innovation at the heart of its policy programme.
TTO Opportunities
31 Jan 2020
Conferences and training events are an excellent way to meet peers, network and meet potential partners. Nevertheless, budgetary constraints is a common conversational topic to many of us who work at TTOs. We tend to have to prioritise which training programmes, conferences and meetings to attend yearly.
KEF – A Step Forward or a Missed Opportunity?
20 Jan 2020
Do the metrics proposed in the new Knowledge Exchange Framework represent a reliable way to measure university innovation, or will they lead universities up the wrong path? OUI’s Chief Operating Officer Adam Stoten discusses.
The Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) has finally arrived, or at least Research England has just published a report confirming the metrics to be used in the inaugural 2020 exercise, following a consultation process and pilot run in which Oxford participated. This represents a significant watershed event in terms of putting a spotlight on Higher Education Institution (HEI) Knowledge Exchange (KE) as a driver of value creation regionally, nationally and internationally. While there is much to celebrate about the fact that government recognises that this area is important and worthy of investment, some significant problems remain with the KEF metrics proposed.
Opportunity for Funding to Support Researchers Planning Future Spin-Outs in the area of Healthy Ageing
6 Dec 2019
UK SPINE is a knowledge exchange initiative supported by Research England’s Connecting Capabilities Fund seeking to improve health in old age.
There is a fund to support translational proof of concept activities for which all English HEIs are able to apply.
The University of Oxford has been challenged by its steering board to use these funds to help accelerate the formation of spin-out companies. They are therefore seeking to identify researchers who are considering spinning-out their research, but who could benefit from some additional research funding to accelerate the process. For example, this could be used to gather extra data or provide proof of concept in a laboratory setting.
Turning introductions into successful university-industry partnerships
6 Dec 2019
Around the world, governments and funding bodies are upping the pressure on universities to increase their commercialisation efforts. Whether it’s to generate a return on investment for public funding, or to secure new funding streams for research, universities are expected now more than ever to work with industry to license intellectual property (IP), launch spin-outs, and establish long-term strategic partnerships and knowledge exchange programs. Regardless of what sort of agreement is on the table, the negotiations between academia and industry can be long and complicated, and it often falls to the technology transfer office (TTO) at the university to handle these conversations.
One digital access point to the wealth of knowledge within UK academia
21 Nov 2019
Making connections
PraxisAuril and the National Centre for Universities and Business, (NCUB) have a lot in common in both supporting the UK’s big ambitions for R&D investment and knowing that partnerships between UK universities and business are key to addressing the challenges facing society and industry today.
The UK has many successful academic industrial partnerships to celebrate and PraxisAuril members are clearly leaders in good practice in this. But if we want to raise the UK’s R&D investment to the OECD average then we need to do more. Successes should be celebrated and news of the great work that is happening across the UK should be more widely shared to inspire growth in the relatively small number of companies making up the lion’s share of R&D spend in the UK. Only around 12% of firms that are ‘innovating’ currently cooperate with a university, and we are all working hard to grow this proportion to supercharge innovation throughout the UK.